Your guide to getting your customer service team ready for BFCM and the holidays
Is that a jingle bell or notification ping from your inbox? 🔔
For business owners and support managers preparing for the holidays in 2020, it’s probably the latter.
As if running a business and providing fantastic support wasn't hectic enough during BFCM and the holiday season, it now has to be done with the additional effects of a pandemic. More than 33% of Americans who usually shop in store for Black Friday won't be lining up this year, according to an Ipsos COVID-19 survey. Instead, 75% of US shoppers will be logging in and making their purchases online to avoid the usual throngs of people.
That's not all that will be different this year.
Not only will you see an influx of online traffic, but the pandemic also brought in new product buying trends like:
Indoor and outdoor furniture
Home office equipment
Board games and puzzles
Exercise equipment
Self-care and beauty
Leisure wear
Additionally, potential restrictions have emerged as the world adapts to its new normal:
Your shipping partners may take longer to fulfill your orders.
More customers will prioritize buying local and shop at stores with safety measures like curbside pickup and contactless delivery.
Customers will be planning ahead this year, meaning more online research before making a purchase.
Customers expect a fast website with fast customer service response-time.
If you don't have your team trained for these changes or give them enough turnaround time to adapt to the new trends this year, you risk negatively impacting the way your customers view your brand.
But don't worry; you've got this! 🙌🏽
Here’s a guide to relieve some holiday pressures that you might be feeling when it comes to getting your team onto Santa's Nice List. Ready?
Let’s get into powering up your customer service ⚡
✅ Have standard replies ready for common questions
You'll notice common questions always arise in customer service. If you can, go through your logs to find the most commonly asked questions and craft quick replies your service agents can copy and paste. This is where you can put your brands' own flair into your responses. To cover more ground, you can even supply your answers in an FAQ document to ease the load on your support team. Some common reasons for customer support include:
A customer's order is lost or delayed
A customer is unsatisfied with their purchase
A customer's order arrives damaged
✅ Find out your store's rush hours
This will help you determine when you need to have heavy scheduled support hours and where you can relax. Use web traffic analytics like Google Analytics or Shopify's admin analytics. Once you know when your store gets hit the hardest, you can tailor your customer support around that the rush so customers can always get a fast response.
✅ Evaluate the human-power you need to get you through the holidays
If you're starting small, you can get away with a simple strategy for determining how many customer service people to hire. If your current person/people doing the job are overwhelmed, hire more.
If you have a bigger team, you'll want to consider hiring a support manager, a representative(s) to handle general inquiries, and specialist(s) to handle specialized topics. Make sure to you have enough people to cover your different support channels like email, phone, chat, and social media while also covering your high-traffic timezones.
PRO-TIP: Pay attention to your customer growth and account for that. A good formula for determining how much help you need is to see whether the Total Support Reps Needed = Total Monthly Tickets / (Tickets/Reps/Month).
✅ Determine the hours you'll be available and in what language(s)
As mentioned above, find out your store's rush hour through web traffic analytics. You'll also be able to see where your customers are coming from. If your business is primarily English, but your customers are coming from a country that speaks a different language, you may want to consider hiring support people for those customers. It's all part of making a memorable experience that will keep your customers coming back.
✅ Source chatbots for frequently asked questions
Chatbots are an essential member of any customer support team. They're always available, you can customize them to your brand, and they can fill the gap on answering frequently asked questions when your support is on break. Customers are thrilled when they can get an immediate response to their questions.
Take a look at one of these chatbots to add to your team:
✅ Make sure your documentation is up to date
This year the pandemic has customers doing more research on products before they buy. Documentation is one of the most important customer service tools, and an FAQ is just the starting point. Detailed documentation about your products, from kitchen knives to fragrance diffusers, reduces the workload on your team and help them to know the product even better. What kind of steel do you source for your knives? Are the fragrances safe for my new-born baby? All things you can answer with documentation that your support team can use to send out in response to queries. Documentation is especially needed if you sell a technical product. You should be describing:
What problems your products solve for users
How users can access your product
How to use the product with guides, troubleshooting and how-tos
Resources like templates and case studies
Where customers can get support when they're stuck
PRO-TIP: If you're stuck for time or need a skilled pro to create your website content, check out the Shopify Experts marketplace to get the docs done for you.
✅ What channels will you use to offer customer service?
You've probably heard it before: be where your customers are. Your loyal paying customers shouldn't have to go to great lengths to get in touch with you, and being available on more channels during the holidays will ensure your customers are finding you. Every online business should think about being on the following channels:
Email
Social media
Telephone
Chat
Forums
Support widgets on your popular pages displaying FAQs and documentation
PRO-TIP: If you're struggling to figure out a good multichannel support strategy, the solution is simple: ask your customers. Reducing their effort is one of the main reasons your customers will keep buying from you.
✅ Are you set up to edit orders when customers changing their mind?
Customers change their minds all the time. Maybe they need their item in a different size or color, or their shipping address has changed. Flexibility with these types of support questions is sure to WOW your customers. When running an online store, Shopify offers great basic order-editing features right in the admin. You're able to add/remove items from orders, issue refunds, and change shipping and email addresses. If you need more advanced order editing in Shopify, Edit Order by Cleverific is an essential tool to add to your customer support arsenal. You'll save time and money by being able to quickly edit your customer's complex orders without breaking a sweat. Consider running an audit of commonly performed edits in your store. If you find that you're only accommodating the shortcomings of your current software, switch to Edit Order for advanced editing like:
Switch shipping speeds for your customers
Easy exchanges and refunds no matter the order age
Add discounts and change line item prices
Edit tax percentage per line item
Change customer contact info like shipping, email, billing address, and customer account
Take complex phone orders with customized line item properties
Advanced edits on orders like adjusting the quantity, add a line item property, and editing/deleting an existing line item property
Advanced search of orders via SKU and barcode
In the end, your ability to offer flexible support with order editing will develop those repeat customers your business needs.
✅ Plan your holiday promos and make sure your team knows how to handle them
Holiday promotions are an important part of skyrocketing your sales during the holiday season, but they can be a pain to plan and implement. We wrote a handy guide about holiday promos you can implement and automate for your holiday sales promotion, so you won't be bogged down by manual tasks. Automation is so easy to implement that you don't have to worry about spending time training your team.
When setting up promotions, over-communicate with your team so they're prepared to help your customers.
✅ Modify your return policy for the holidays
Your return policy will make or break a customer's decisions to buy, and a pandemic holiday season is bound to have a fair share of problems that will be out of your control. Things like shipping problems or delays due to inventory or shipping partners can come up, so having a solid return policy that benefits your customers will build trust and keep your customers coming back for more. Create clear return policies and straightforward delivery timelines. You can also minimize customer returns before they buy by:
Writing updated and detailed product descriptions
Include product measurements
Include at least four clear, professional photos of your products with an accurate display of color
✅ Create a feedback loop
Bill Gates said it best: "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
Without customer feedback, how do we know what we're doing wrong and how we can optimize to do it, right? Here at Cleverific, we take customer feedback seriously. We're a small team, so whenever we speak to our customers, we place their feedback in a dedicated Slack channel for everyone to see, from our marketing team to our dev team. If you're a larger team, you might need different tooling, but the methodology remains the same:
Ask for customer feedback
Categorize the feedback
Act on the feedback
Follow-up with customers who shared feedback
Once you're able to breathe again in Q1, come up with an action plan to build your loyal customers based on the feedback you received.
💃 🕺More mingle, more jingle 🔔 💰
Happy customers sing your praise and usually become loyal, repeat customers. Part of creating a happy customer is building trust by providing outstanding customer support, especially during the holiday seasons, and even more so during a pandemic. A big way to help your team give the best support they can is to over-communicate, make their life as easy as possible by automating when you can (hello chatbots and promo automation!), and making sure they're finding where your customers are and having memorable conversations.
